For many years it has been believed that in the Federative Republic of Brazil there exists a “Racial Democracy”. There are several reasons that people believe this:

1) With the level of miscegenation (race mixing) in Brazil, it is impossible to know who is black and who is white.

2) Legalized segregation as practiced in Apartheid era South Africa and Jim Crow era United States never existed in Brazil.

3) Blacks and whites live together harmoniously in Brazil.

4) In Brazil, there is only one culture whereas in the US, there is “black culture” and “white culture”.

In truth, citizens of many nations believe in the myths that act as the glue that keeps societies together. Americans believe in a “color-blind” society in which there is “equal opportunity”. Brazilians, on the other hand, believe in a “racial democracy” based upon the “Fable of the Three Races (A Fábula das Três Raças)”; the Indian, the Portuguese and the African, the foundation of the Brazilian people.

It has been well documented that in the United States, there exist the infamous “one drop rule” in which any person of any known African ancestry is considered black. African-Americans are familiar with several historical figures who could have “passed” for white if they so chose. Prominent examples include Walter White, an executive secretary of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. In Brazil, because of a comparatively higher rate of miscegenation, such a rule would label nearly the entire population as black. According to some estimates, at least 86% of all Brazilians carry at least 10% African DNA. Because of this deep history of miscegenation and its production of hundreds of different phenotypes, in the 1980 census, Brazilians used 136 different terms to describe their “race”, or better yet, color.

Many Americans who have studied the question of race in Brazil have concluded that there actually exists more than one hundred races in Brazil. The reason for this fallacious assumption is a racial ideology predicated on the “one drop” rule. In the US, a person can be classified as black even if they have blond hair and blue eyes if it is known that they have African ancestry. The truth is, in the 1980 census, Brazilians were allowed to use any term they thought best described their skin color. Color, not race. The key here is, in that census, Brazilians used terms such as “cor-de-canela (color of cinnamon)”, “moreno (brown, dark or brunette)”, and “café-com-leite (coffee with milk)” in the same ways that African-Americans use terms such as “caramel”, “mocha”, or “high yellow”. They were merely descriptions of skin tone. In more recent census studies, Brazilians chose from only five colors: “branco (white)”, “preto (black)”, “pardo (brown or mixed race)”, “amarelo (yellow or Asian)” and “indio (Indian)”.